Hitchcock never won the Academy Award for Best Director. He was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement in , but never personally received an Academy Award of Merit. Until the later part of his career, Hitchcock was far more popular with film audiences than with film critics, especially the elite British and American critics. Hitchcock was one of the first directors to whom they applied their auteur theory, which stresses the artistic authority of the director in the film-making process.
Hitchcock's innovations and vision have influenced a great number of filmmakers, producers, and actors. His influence helped start a trend for film directors to control artistic aspects of their movies without answering to the movie's producer. His family was mostly Roman Catholic. Hitchcock was sent to Catholic boarding schools in London. He often described his childhood as being very lonely and sheltered, which was undoubtedly compounded by his weight issues. Hitchcock claimed that on one occasion early in his life, after he had acted childishly, his father sent him to the local police station carrying a note.
When he presented the police officer on duty with the note, he was locked in a cell for a few moments, long enough to be petrified. This was a favorite anecdote of his, and the incident is often cited in connection with the theme of distrust of police which runs through many of his films. His mother would often make him address her while standing at the foot of her bed, especially if he behaved badly, forcing him to stand there for hours.
This would be recalled by the character Norman Bates in Psycho. After graduating, he became a draftsman and advertising designer with a cable company. About that time, Hitchcock became intrigued by photography and started working in film in London.
In , he obtained a full-time job at Islington Studios under its American owners, Famous Players-Lasky, and their British successors, Gainsborough Pictures, designing the titles for silent movies. The commercial failure of this film and the one that followed it, The Mountain Eagle , threatened to derail his promising career.
In , however, Hitchcock made his debut in the thriller genre. Like many of his earlier works, it was influenced by Expressionist techniques he had witnessed firsthand in Germany. This is the first truly "Hitchcockian" film, incorporating such themes as the "wrong man". Following the success of The Lodger , Hitchcock began his first efforts to promote himself in the media, and hired a publicist to cement his growing reputation as one of the British film industry's rising stars.
In , he was to marry his assistant director Alma Reville. Their daughter Patricia was born in Alma was Hitchcock's closest collaborator.
She wrote some of his screenplays and though often uncredited worked with him on every one of his films. In , he began work on his tenth film Blackmail. While the film was in production, the studio decided to make it one of Britain's first sound pictures.
With the climax of the film taking place on the dome of the British Museum, Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences. His first film for the company, The Man Who Knew Too Much , was a success and his second, The 39 Steps , is often considered one of the best films from his early period. It was also one of the first to introduce the concept of the " MacGuffin", a plot device around which a whole story would revolve.
In The 39 Steps , the MacGuffin is a stolen set of blueprints. His next major success was in , The Lady Vanishes , a clever and fast-paced film about the search for a kindly old Englishwoman Dame May Whitty , who disappears while on board a train in the fictional country of Vandrika a thinly-veiled version of Nazi Germany.
By the end of the s, Hitchcock was at the top of his game artistically, and in a position to name his own terms when David O. Selznick managed to entice the Hitchcocks to Hollywood. Hollywood Hitchcock's gallows humour and the suspense that became his trademark continued in his American work. However, working arrangements with his new producer were less than optimal. Selznick suffered from perennial money problems and Hitchcock was often unhappy with the amount of creative control demanded by Selznick over his films.
Consequently, Selznick ended up "loaning" Hitchcock to the larger studios more often than producing Hitchcock's films himself. With the prestigious Selznick picture Rebecca in , Hitchcock made his first American movie, although it was set in England and based on a novel by English author Dame Daphne du Maurier.
The film has also subsequently been noted for the lesbian undercurrents in Judith Anderson's performance. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture of However, the statuette went to Selznick as the film's producer, and the film did not win the Best Director award. There were additional problems between Selznick and Hitchcock; Selznick, as he usually did, imposed very restrictive rules upon Hitchcock, hindering his creative control. Hitchcock was forced to shoot the film as Selznick wanted, immediately creating friction within their relationship.
At the same time, Selznick complained about Hitchcock's "goddam jigsaw cutting," which meant that the producer did not have nearly the leeway to create his own film as he liked, but had to follow Hitchcock's vision of the finished product. Hitchcock's second American film, the European-set thriller Foreign Correspondent , was also nominated for Best Picture that year. Hitchcock's work during the s was diverse, ranging from the romantic comedy Mr.
Smith and the courtroom drama The Paradine Case to the dark and disturbing Shadow of a Doubt Saboteur was the first of two films that Hitchcock made for Universal, a studio where he would work in his later years. Dealing with the threat of sabotage, without labeling the actual nation for whom the saboteurs worked probably Nazi Germany , Hitchcock was forced to utilize Universal contract players Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, both known for their work in comedies and light dramas, and made the most of the situation.
Breaking with Hollywood tradition, Hitchcock did extensive location filming, especially in New York City , and memorably depicted a confrontation between a suspected saboteur Cummings and a real saboteur Norman Lloyd atop the Statue of Liberty.
Shadow of a Doubt , his personal favourite and the second of the Universal films, was about young Charlotte "Charlie" Newton Teresa Wright who suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Spencer Joseph Cotten of murder. The film also harkens to one of Cotten's better known films, Citizen Kane. Hitchcock again filmed extensively on location, this time in the Northern California town of Santa Rosa. The actual dream sequence in the film was considerably cut from the original scene planned to run for some minutes, but proved too disturbing for the finished film.
Notorious marked Hitchcock's first film as a producer as well as director. From this point on, Hitchcock would produce his own films, giving him a far greater degree of freedom to pursue the projects that interested him. Starring Hitchcock regulars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant and featuring a plot about Nazis, uranium, and South America, Notorious was a huge box office success and has remained one of Hitchcock's most acclaimed films.
Its inventive use of suspense and props briefly led to Hitchcock's being under surveillance by the CIA due to his use of uranium as a plot device. Hitchcock's first colour film, Rope appeared in Here Hitchcock experimented with marshalling suspense in a confined environment, as he had done earlier with Lifeboat.
He also experimented with exceptionally long takes — up to ten minutes see Themes and devices. Featuring James Stewart in the leading role, Rope was the first of an eventual four films Stewart would make for Hitchcock. Based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the s, Rope is also among several films with homosexual subtext to emerge from the Hays Office—controlled Hollywood studio era. Under Capricorn , set in nineteenth-century Australia, also used this short-lived technique, but to a more limited extent.
He again used Technicolor in this production, then returned to black and white films for several years. For these two films Hitchcock formed a production company with Sidney Bernstein, called Transatlantic Pictures, which folded after these two unsuccessful pictures. Peak years and decline With Strangers on a Train , based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, Hitchcock combined many of the best elements from his preceding British and American films.
Two men casually meet and speculate on removing people who are causing them difficulty. One of the men, though, takes this banter entirely seriously. With Farley Granger reprising some elements of his role from Rope , Strangers continued the director's interest in the narrative possibilities of homosexual blackmail and murder. MCA head Lew Wasserman, whose client list included James Stewart , Janet Leigh, and other actors who would appear in Hitchcock's films, had a significent impact in packaging and marketing Hitchcock's films beginning in the s.
With Wasserman's help, Hitchcock received tremendous creative freedom from the studios, as well as substantive financial rewards as a result of Paramount's profit-sharing contract. Three very popular films starring Grace Kelly followed.
Hollywood Celebrity Documentary post-production Self. Video documentary Self. Hitchcock TV Movie documentary Self. Video documentary short Self. TV Series documentary Self - Self - Horror Film Director. Documentary Self. Self uncredited. Story Hitchcock Meets the Smiths Video documentary short Self uncredited. TV Movie documentary Self uncredited. Show all 77 episodes. Documentary Self uncredited. Related Videos. Official Sites: Official Site.
Alternate Names: Mr. Height: 5' 7" 1. Spouse: Alma Reville his death 1 child. Children: Patricia Hitchcock. Relatives: Hitchcock, William sibling See more ».
Edit Did You Know? Personal Quote: There is a dreadful story that I hate actors. Imagine anyone hating James Stewart Jack L. I can't imagine how such a rumor began. Of course it may possibly be because I was once quoted as saying that actors are cattle. My actor friends know I would never be capable of such a thoughtless, rude and unfeeling remark, that I would never call them cattle What I probably said was that See more ».
Robert Thomas, follows a young married couple on holiday in the Alps. The wife disappears, and after a prolonged search the police bring back someone they claim to be her; she even says she is the man's wife, but the man has never Nickname: Hitch See more ». Star Sign: Leo. Getting Started Contributor Zone ». It was while working at Henley's that he began to write, submitting short articles for the in-house publication. From his very first piece, he employed themes of false accusations, conflicted emotions and twist endings with impressive skill.
In , Hitchcock entered the film industry with a full-time position at the Famous Players-Lasky Company designing title cards for silent films. Within a few years, he was working as an assistant director. In , Hitchcock directed his first film and began making the "thrillers" for which he became known the world over. His film Blackmail is said to be the first British "talkie. In , Hitchcock left England for Hollywood. Some of his most famous films include Psycho , The Birds and Marnie His works became renowned for their depictions of violence, although many of his plots merely function as decoys meant to serve as a tool for understanding complex psychological characters.
His cameo appearances in his own films, as well as his interviews, film trailers and the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents , made him a cultural icon.
Hitchcock directed more than 50 feature films in a career spanning six decades. He was survived by his lifetime partner, assistant director and closest collaborator, Alma Reville, also known as "Lady Hitchcock," who died in
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